In the evening, Yolcaut and Miztli came back to the palace. Yolcaut wouldn’t let me watch TV with him. He pretended nothing was wrong and sent me away with Miztli to distract me. Anyway now I know why Yolcaut didn’t want me to watch TV. Miztli told me, because Miztli is really good at secrets. What I mean is Miztli’s really good if you want to find out secrets, and really bad if you want him to keep them. And you don’t even have to say a thing to him. What normally happens is that to find out secrets you have to ask lots of times or even give people devastating blows to make them tell you. But not with Miztli. As I’m a mute I didn’t ask him anything but even so he told me that they’re talking about Yolcaut on the TV, about Yolcaut’s business. Although they don’t actually call him Yolcaut, they call him the King. Miztli says that now we’re really in the shit. He says:
‘Just think, he won’t even let you watch TV any more. Get ready, now the paranoia’s really going to start.’
I thought Yolcaut’s paranoia had been around for a while and now it looks like it’s only just started. In the dictionary it says that to be paranoid you have to think about just one thing. That is, paranoid people are mad. It’s as if I only thought about hats. But I think about lots of things: hats, samurai, swords, Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses, lettuce, tiny little pistols with minuscule bullets, guillotines, the French, bullets, corpses, hair transplants… Just for the sake of thinking I even think about the Spanish, and they don’t even like cutting off kings’ heads. The thing is, I’m not paranoid. Who knows what it is Yolcaut thinks about all the time?
I knew it, I knew it: Mazatzin isn’t a saint at all, he’s a pathetic traitor. He’s written an article in a magazine where he reveals all our secrets, our enemies and our mysteries. The article has photos of our palace and the title is: ‘Down The King’s Rabbit Hole’. It talks about our millions of pesos, our millions of dollars, our millions of euros, the gold and diamond rings the King wears, the guns and rifles, Miztli and Chichilkuali, the politicians, even Quecholli. And on the cover there’s a photo of our tigers’ cage.
The magazine doesn’t say the author is Mazatzin, but it’s him, we know it is. It can’t be anyone else. He hasn’t come to give me my lessons for two days. And the name at the end of the article is Chimalli, which means shield. And the meaning of names is very important to Mazatzin, that’s why he used to call me Usagi and not Tochtli. That’s also why he doesn’t call Yolcaut Yolcaut in the article, but the King, like they call him on the TV. Shields are for protection. In other words, Mazatzin must have given himself a name to protect himself because he’s scared of Yolcaut.
I know about the article because of Miztli, because Yolcaut doesn’t tell me anything. It’s as if he’s gone mute as well, mute just with me. He talks to other people. Actually he talks to everyone to give orders. I think he’s tired of giving me presents to stop me being mute now, and as I haven’t stopped being mute he must be taking his revenge. Gangs aren’t about revenge, and they’re not about lies or hiding the truth either. At this rate we won’t be the best gang for eight kilometres any more. In fact, we won’t be a gang at all.
The thing with the article meant I stopped being mute just a bit because I had to talk to Miztli. It was to find out what it said in the magazine and to ask him what was going to happen to Mazatzin. By the way, Mazatzin didn’t write anything about me, he pretended I didn’t exist. Miztli thinks it was to protect me. Pathetic. I’m a samurai and we samurai don’t need anyone to protect us. At the most we might need another samurai to protect us, especially when our honour is in danger. But a samurai never needs a pathetic traitor to protect him.
In any case Mazatzin wanting to protect me is useless. Because no one’s going to read his article. I used to think the only thing you could kidnap was people. Well it turns out it’s not, you can kidnap other things too, like magazines. That’s what Yolcaut did when he found out about the article. He phoned up and gave orders to buy up all the magazines with Mazatzin’s article in them. Miztli says that Chichilkuali went to a factory where they do recycling: all the magazines will be put in a machine and the machine will turn them into paper for wrapping tortillas in. Poor Mazatzin, Miztli says he’d do well to go very far away. I think Mazatzin’s gone to the empire of Japan. Yolcaut’s definitely going to drop at least four atomic bombs on him.
Yolcaut really is a paranoid madman. First he went mute with me and wouldn’t let me watch TV and now he’s shouting at me to run, come quick, Mazatzin’s on the TV. I’ve got a theory: educated people go to jail because they’re really idiots. Like Mazatzin, who’s not only a traitor to us but it turns out is also a traitor to the country of Honduras. In the country of Honduras forging official documents is a serious crime. Crime: it’s a nice word. It turns out the Hondurans are nationalists and they get annoyed if someone tries to be a fake Honduran. If you want a Honduran passport there are two options: you’re either a real Honduran or you go to jail.
The worst thing for Mazatzin is that the men from the government of the country of Honduras think he’s made fun of the country of Honduras. That’s what the vice-president said, that he also made fun of them by trying to use the ridiculous name of Franklin Gómez. The vice-president was called Elvis Martínez. I think only idiots flee to the country of Honduras with a fake Honduran passport. Mazatzin was caught going through the centre of Tegucigalpa, which is the capital of the country of Honduras, a country that’s only for real Hondurans.
A man from the government of Mexico said they couldn’t do anything for Mazatzin, that Mexico respected the sovereignty of our brothers in the country of Honduras. Are Mexicans and Hondurans brothers? Politicians really do make complicated deals. Yolcaut was really enjoying himself laughing at Mazatzin when he decided to say one of his enigmatic phrases. He said:
‘Think the worst and you’ll be right.’
And he carried on laughing like a paranoid madman who only thinks about one thing, about laughing.
Not only was this phrase not really enigmatic at all, but it also helped me to solve other mysteries. In other words, this phrase means that what’s happening is Yolcaut’s fault. That’s what the orders are for, to organise the enigmas. But then a very enigmatic thing really did happen: there was a news report on the TV about Mazatzin’s life and they were saying he was dangerous. All because he’d gone to live very far away, in the middle of nowhere, on top of a mountain covered with rebel Indians who wanted to shoot the men from the government dead. That’s why Mazatzin went to the country of Honduras too, to organise the Indians of the country of Honduras to kill the men from the government of the country of Honduras. Now the government of the country of Honduras has a long list of crimes that will put Mazatzin in jail for many years. Yolcaut says at least twenty-five. And he laughs again. After the news report the people on TV rang up the man who’d been Mazatzin’s partner in his advertising business and he said he hadn’t seen him for two years, since he went to live on the mountain with the guerrillas. That was the mysterious thing, because Mazatzin wasn’t with the guerrillas. He was with us teaching me things from books.
If I was Mazatzin I’d have fled to the empire of Japan. And over there I would have ordered a sword to be made for me so I could be a real samurai. Instead he went to the country of Honduras, and now because of him my fingers really hurt from playing on the Playstation 3 so much.
Today I met the sixteenth person I know and her name is Alotl. According to Cinteotl, Alotl’s bottom is this big: two metres. Alotl isn’t a herbivore like Quecholli, because she doesn’t just eat salads with lettuce, she also eats alphabet soup and enchiladas and meat. And she’s not mute, just the opposite, she says lots of things. She says:
‘Little man, don’t you think it’s a bit late to be walking around dressed like that? This is not the time to be wearing a dressing gown.’
She also says to Cinteotl and Itzpapalotl:
‘What a big house and how lovely it is, and what good taste you have, such pretty vases!’
&nbs
p; Because she doesn’t know this isn’t really a house, it’s a palace. If she knew it was a palace she’d realise that it isn’t really a very good palace, because it’s not immaculate. The vases she’s talking about are the Chinese vases in the living room with the armchairs. The vases have dragons on them breathing fire from their snouts and the truth is they are pretty. And later, out on the terrace, she said:
‘Oh, a tiger in a cage, so big and so beautiful, what good taste to have a tiger in the garden!’
Then the tiger roared. I think the tiger wanted to eat her. She didn’t realise, she just said Oh oh oh, what a fierce little kitty, and asked me if the tiger had a name.
Alotl talked so much I was embarrassed to carry on being a mute, because she kept asking me about the dressing gown, about the samurai hat, about the animals’ names and saying how did I get to be so handsome? And she was always stroking my head and laughing and saying Oh, oh, oh, the little mute. I had to explain to her about the samurai and why I’m a samurai and how I need a sword to be a real samurai. She also made me show her my collection of hats. She’s a nationalist, because the hats she liked best were the charro sombreros, even though I showed her all my three-cornered hats and my authentic safari hats.
When we sat down to eat on the terrace it wasn’t an enigmatic moment like before, because Alotl spent the whole time talking about her village and making jokes. Her village is in the north, in Sinaloa. I think Yolcaut liked Alotl, because he even asked her questions and laughed at her jokes. The jokes were about how good-looking Yolcaut and I are and how much we look like each other, just as handsome. Alotl made the names of everyone at the table with her alphabet soup, but she wrote ours like this: ‘toshtli’ and ‘llolcau’.
The good thing was that Alotl didn’t spend the whole day going on and on, because she disappeared a lot with Yolcaut, four times. Miztli was also surprised they disappeared so many times and he was happy because he was the one who’d brought Alotl to the palace. When I asked him why they were disappearing so much he laughed and told me a secret, something super-enigmatic:
‘Thirty-six, twenty-four, perfect score, Tochtli, thirty-six, twenty-four, perfect score.’
Now Alotl comes every day and not just two or three times a week. One day as a present she brought me a straw hat with a ribbon on it with a picture of a palm tree that says: Souvenir from Acapulco. Another day she was wearing a skirt that was so short Cinteotl didn’t want to serve her any food. The truth is, the straw hat from Acapulco is the worst hat in my collection, I’d throw it away if it was up to me. The problem is I feel sorry for Yolcaut, who was really pleased with the present. And the skirt really was very short, so short that twice I managed to see her knickers, which were yellow.
The best day of all was the day Alotl brought a samurai film I hadn’t seen. She said it was to show me that real samurai don’t wear dressing gowns. We even made a bet: if I won she’d buy me a samurai costume and if she won I’d stop wearing the dressing gown. It turned out that some of the samurai were wearing dressing gowns and others weren’t, because they were wearing trousers and armour on their chests. Yolcaut said the dressing gown the samurai wore wasn’t a checked one like mine. Theirs were black. So they stopped the film and we didn’t carry on watching it until I’d taken off the dressing gown.
Anyway, we had a lot of fun watching the film, especially the part with the fights. We also had fun watching the part with the conversations, because the samurai didn’t speak Japanese, but a funny kind of Spanish. Yolcaut said they spoke like Spaniards and started calling me what one samurai had been calling one of the baddies: rascal.
At the end of the film one samurai cut off the head of another samurai who was his best friend. He wasn’t a traitor, it was the opposite. He did it because they were friends and he wanted to save his honour. Then I don’t know what got into Yolcaut because when the film was over he took me into the room with the guns and rifles. He told me that there weren’t any secrets between us and let me look at all the weapons and explained what their names were, the countries where they’d been made and the calibres.
For pistols we have Berettas from the country of Italy, Brownings from the kingdom of United and lots from the country of the United States: mainly Colts and Smith & Wessons. By the way, you can put a silencer on the guns, to make them mute. The rifles are nearly all the same. We have some called AK-47s, from the country of Russia, and other ones called M-16, from the country of the United States. Although we’ve mostly got Uzis from the country of Israel. Yolcaut also showed me the name of the rifle with the gigantic bullets, which isn’t really a rifle, it’s a weapon called a bazooka.
Before I went to bed Yolcaut asked me if I’d paid attention to the samurai film and if I’d understood the ending properly. I said I had. Then he said the most enigmatic and mysterious thing he’s ever said to me. He said:
‘One day you’ll have to do the same for me.’
Today when I woke up there was a really big wooden box next to my bed. It had lots of stickers and labels on it that said: FRAGILE and HANDLE WITH CARE. I ran to ask Yolcaut what it was and to ask him to help me open it, because it was nailed shut.
We opened the box and inside there were lots of little polystyrene balls, thousands. I started taking them out until I found the stuffed heads of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette of Austria, our Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses. The truth is, the people who stuffed them had done a very immaculate job. The severed heads have their snouts open so you can see their tongues and their four tusks. And they’re shiny, because they’ve been varnished with clear paint. Their eyes are made of white marbles with a brown pupil. And their minuscule ears are intact. Their necks are attached to a board that has a little golden plaque with their names. Louis XVI’s head, which is a very big head, says LOUIS XVI. And underneath: Choeropsis liberiensis. Marie Antoinette of Austria’s head, which is a smaller head, says: MARIE ANTOINETTE. And it also says: Choeropsis liberiensis.
Together Yolcaut and I hung the heads on the wall in my bedroom: Louis XVI on the right and Marie Antoinette of Austria on the left. Really it was Yolcaut who put the nails in and arranged the heads. I just told him if they were wonky or straight. Then I got up on a chair and tried lots of different hats on them. The ones that look best are the African safari hats. So I left the African safari hats on them, but I’ll only leave them there for a bit. Soon the gold and diamond crowns we ordered to be made for them will get here.
On the day of the coronation, me and my dad will have a party.
GLOSSARY
Tochtli – his name means ‘rabbit’ in Nahuatl, Mexico’s main indigenous language (and Usagi is Japanese for rabbit). All the characters, apart from Cinteotl the cook, have Nahuatl names that translate as some sort of animal: Yolcaut means rattlesnake; Mazatzin, deer; Miztli, puma; Quecholli, flamingo; Chichilkuali, red eagle; Itzpapalotl, black butterfly; Itzcuauhtli, white eagle; and Alotl, macaw.
pozole – a traditional Mexican soup or stew of pre-Colombian origin, generally prepared with maize, pork and chilli. According to research by Mexican and Spanish academics, the original recipe included the flesh of human sacrifices on special occasions. This was banned after the Spanish conquest.
tacos al pastor – literally ‘shepherd-style tacos’, this is a very popular Mexican version of the Middle Eastern street snack of spit-roasted meat, probably brought over by Lebanese immigrants. Similar to the Turkish döner kebab, it consists of slices of spit-roasted pork in a tortilla with a garnish of onions, coriander and pineapple.
‘The King’ [‘El Rey’] is a well-known ranchera (a song sung by one person with a guitar during the Mexican Revolution, associated with mariachi groups), composed and most famously sung by José Alfredo Jiménez. The lyrics in Spanish are ‘No tengo trono ni reina, ni nadie que me comprenda, pero sigo siendo el rey’ [I don’t have a throne or a queen, or anyone who understands me, but I’m still the king]. Villalobos has changed the lyrics slightly (from ‘anyone who understands me’
to ‘anyone to keep me’), as this was how he used to sing it as a child.
mole – a thick Mexican chilli sauce combining complex flavours, or a dish based on this sauce. Ingredients can include black pepper, cumin, cloves, aniseed, tomatoes, onion, bread, garlic, sesame seeds, dried fruit and chocolate.
tampiqueña – marinated steak served with cheese and enchiladas or tortilla chips.
charro – a traditional Mexican horseman, somewhat like the North American cowboy. Charros take part in charreadas (a little like rodeos), and wear very distinctive colourful clothing, including a wide-brimmed hat.
Poza Rica – a medium-sized industrial city in the state of Veracruz. Founded in 1951 and with a skyline dominated by modern buildings and the remnants of the local oil industry, it is not renowned for its beauty.
La Chona – the local name for the city of Encarnación de Díaz, a town in the state of Jalisco, also not renowned for its beauty.
naco – a derogatory Mexican term, quite close to the English slang word ‘chav’. It means a vulgar person with no class, style or education, and tends to be used by people from the dominant class to refer to those of the lower class, although it is malleable and can also be used about ‘new money’.
Down the Rabbit Hole Page 6